Indeed, it is up to the listener, he wrote, to “find his own significance” in the direct experience he has of a work (429). The repetitions of In C, Parsons asserted, had nothing to do with a structuring into motifs or an attempt to organize sound. These continual repetitions became lost in a jumble of sound that had to be seen “as a world of immediate sensation.” Thus, by mobilizing the audience and its direct experience of the sonic jumble, Parsons managed to reconcile the repetitions, cells, and structures with Cageian chance.21
Cardew’s work in promoting Young’s music (and that of some of his associates, such as Riley) in Britain over the course of the 1960s, continued by some of his disciples, clearly paid off. Over the years Smalley, who had stood up for Stockhausen to castigate Cardew and Young in 1967, gradually revised his judgment. Already in 1968 he seemed much less critical of Young. He asserted that Stockhausen’s Hymnen, stemming from his search for a “World-music,” was particularly influenced by the American composer (563). In 1969, on the model of AMM (Mark 2012, 99–100), Smalley founded Intermodulation, an improvisation group, with Tim Souster, a composer who had promoted the work of Cardew and Young on the BBC Third Programme as well as in the journal Tempo (Souster 1968–69, 6).22 The group played Cardew, Riley, and Stockhausen.23 In 1972 Smalley dubbed Cardew “the most important English composer since Dunstable,” or at least “the first composer since that time who has radiated rather than absorbed influences” (1972c, 593). He then asserted that the section “On the Role of the Instructions in the Interpretation of Indeterminate Music,” published in Treatise Handbook (Cardew 1971, xiv–xvi) and “principally concerned with La Monte Young’s X for Henry Flynt . . . should be required reading for those critics who dismiss this music with an air of philistine indifference” (593).24 Some months later, again following Cardew in his Treatise Handbook (1971, xx), he posited that “perhaps it is the simplification rather than the elaboration of musical language which is now the most fruitful way forward.” Riley’s music and especially Young’s had convinced him (Smalley 1972d). The former detractor laid down his arms.
LA MONTE YOUNG, COMPOSER OF ART MUSIC
In the Britain of the late 1960s and early ’70s, as we have seen, a range of forces combined to validate Young’s standing as a member of the music establishment. What happened in Britain from 1967 to 1972 that might have helped change the perceived nature of an American body of work from 1960? Interconnected actors in all fields (musicologists, critics, composers, and musicians), along with their artifacts (articles, courses, programs, and institutions), mounted a collective effort around the figure of Young and his aesthetic, as presented by Cardew and his successors, that grew until it became hard to ignore. After Smalley’s conversion, the “state of music” as it was known in the early 1960s subtly changed. A “new music” appeared.
The presence of Young and his work in the American contemporary music landscape as seen from Britain now rested on a solid mound of facts whose legitimacy was questioned less and less. If there were still those who would dispute Young’s place in the music establishment, they would have to confront a long chain of alliances formed over the entire decade. The importance that some wished to give to Young had been realized: in the British music establishment of the early 1970s, Young had clearly become a composer to be taken seriously. “Seriously,” too, because even though jazz, improvisation, group, performer/composer, and audience are among the many terms that dot the pages written on Young and his associates, their work still tends to be placed on the serious side of the boundary separating popular and serious music.25
The La Monte Young who was promulgated in Britain through Cardew’s campaign was essentially the pre-1962 composer (with his Compositions of 1960, Poem, X for Henry Flynt, and Death Chant). Although the emergence and success of improvisation groups seen as sharing some of the qualities of Young’s later experimentations were recognized, this trend received less attention. An aesthetic relying on the collective playing of one or two sustained sounds—electrified, no less—remained difficult to defend, even through a Cageian “analysis grid.” In the early 1970s, however ill-defined the outlines of his music may have been, it was the early Young who, in Great Britain, won his place in the world of art music.
Sidebar 1
COMPOSITION 1960 #3
Announce to the audience when the piece will begin and end if there is a limit on duration. It may be of any duration.
Then announce that everyone may do whatever he wishes for the duration of the composition.
5-14-60
COMPOSITION 1960 #10
to Bob Morris
Draw a straight line and follow it.
October 1960
La Monte Young, Composition 1960 #3 and #10.
3. Transcribing Music
NEW YORK AVANT-GARDISTS AND MONOTONALITY
NEW YORK AVANT-GARDISTS
The American music establishment, like the British, did not fail to note Young’s first steps into the avant-garde at the beginning of the 1960s. In 1962 the composer was mentioned in the Musical Times’ American competitor, the Musical Quarterly. At that time the latter journal was directed, as it had been since 1915, by the music publisher Schirmer. Like the Musical Times, it sought to reach both professional musicians and music lovers. Hugh Wiley Hitchcock, a specialist in Marc-Antoine Charpentier teaching at Hunter College in New York (Morgan 2001b), was a regular contributor. He gave Young a far less favorable welcome in the journal than his British colleagues did. Reporting on the “ultra-modern” concert series ONCE—A Festival of Musical Premieres, he wrote that the pieces by Young and by Terry Jennings, musicians associated with the “Cage-Tudor-Maxfield New York Group,” “communicated not a shred of novelty, iconoclasm, or even good old nonsensical Dada. Their self-conscious and slightly sheepish doings were tired, effete, lacking in conviction, humor, anger, involvement—or, indeed, any expression or evocation of human emotion. They seem to have confused inaction with oriental tranquillity, lack of responsibility with the detachment of Zen” (Hitchcock 1962, 245–46).
Paul Cooper, a composer who, like Hitchcock, had studied at the University of Michigan, also attended the concert of Young and Jennings. His review, published in the Ann Arbor News, was even harsher. “Total indignation,” “thoroughly degenerate,” “in brinkmanship of insanity” are the terms he used to describe the performance of these “two over-aged juvenile delinquents [who] slouched into town attempting to represent the avant-garde of New York” (quoted in Flynt 1996, 73). Their approach was not new, he wrote: “The Dadaists and surrealists of the 20’s and 30’s were infinitely more imaginative.” In any case, Cooper continued, “I for one refuse to believe that a movement based on combined negative philosophies of East and West filtered through talentless, unprincipled personalities should achieve more than an agonized reappraisal from serious composers. . . . Some pianissimo pokings at the piano . . . some exploration of the squealing possibilities of a single reed saxophone; . . . reciting of ‘words, words, words . . .’ for approximately 10 minutes”—for Cooper, this list spoke for itself. “At times we succumbed to oral ridicule, needless to say,” he commented. “But . . . there can be no question of its having any value either for music, theater, or humor.” For Cooper, as for Hitchcock, the clear lack of savoir faire and the inability of Young and his collaborators to transcend the aesthetic limits that others had crossed before them denied their music any credibility.
Three years later, in 1965, Hitchcock again wrote on a concert by Young for the Musical Quarterly. This time the concert was given at the Carnegie Recital Hall as part of a series organized
